Woman charged in fatal MySpace hoax

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LOS ANGELES — A federal grand jury yesterday indicted a Missouri woman for her role in perpetrating a hoax on the online social network MySpace against a 13-year-old neighbor who then committed suicide.

Lori Drew of suburban St. Louis helped create a false-identity MySpace account to contact Megan Meier, who thought she was chatting with a 16-year-old boy named Josh Evans, authorities said. Josh didn't exist.

Megan hanged herself at home in October 2006 after receiving cruel messages, including one stating that the world would be better off without her.

Salvador Hernandez, assistant director in charge of the Los Angeles FBI office, called the case heart-rending.

"The Internet is a world unto itself. People must know how far they can go before they must stop. They exploited a young girl's weaknesses," he said. "Whether the defendant could have foreseen the results, she's responsible for her actions."

Mrs. Drew was charged with one count of conspiracy and three counts of accessing protected computers without authorization to get information used to inflict emotional distress on the girl. She has denied creating the account or sending messages to Megan.

U.S. Attorney Thomas P. O'Brien said this was the first time that the federal statute on accessing protected computers has been used in a social-networking case. It has been used in the past to address hacking.

"This was a tragedy that did not have to happen," he said.

Both the girl and MySpace are named as victims in the case, he said.

MySpace is a subsidiary of Beverly Hills-based Fox Interactive Media Inc., which is owned by News Corp. The indictment noted that MySpace computer servers are located in Los Angeles County.

Because of juvenile privacy rules, the U.S. attorney's office said, the indictment refers to the girl as M.T.M.

FBI agents in St. Louis and Los Angeles investigated the case, Mr. Hernandez said.

Each of the four counts carries a maximum possible penalty of five years in prison.

Mrs. Drew will be arraigned in St. Louis and then moved to Los Angeles for trial.

The indictment says MySpace members agree to abide by terms of service that include, among other things, not promoting information that they know to be false or misleading; not soliciting personal information from anyone 18 and younger; and not using information gathered from the Web site to "harass, abuse or harm other people."

Mrs. Drew and others who were not named conspired to violate the service terms from about September 2006 to mid-October that year, according to the indictment. It states that they registered as a MySpace member under a phony name and used the account to obtain information on the girl.

Mrs. Drew and her co-conspirators "used the information obtained over the MySpace computer system to torment, harass, humiliate, and embarrass the juvenile MySpace member," the indictment charged.

After the girl killed herself, Mrs. Drew and the others deleted the information for the account, the indictment said.

Last month, an employee of Mrs. Drew, 19-year-old Ashley Grills, told ABC's "Good Morning America" that she created the false MySpace profile but that Mrs. Drew wrote some of the messages to Megan.

Miss Grills said Mrs. Drew suggested talking to Megan via the Internet to find out what Megan was saying about Mrs. Drew's daughter, who was a former friend.